Planning ways of marketing for your app you definitely got to consider word of mouth. Someone can underestimate its value but just think about it: 83% of people trust recommendations of their friends or family.
So what you got to consider to make ’em talk about your app?
Provide Quality
The first thing about word of mouth marketing of your app is product quality. It is the basis. Make an app people would be happy to talk about and recommend their friends or family. Make them proud of starting using your app earlier than their friends.
Because even if the concept of your product is great — bad UI, big amount of bugs and app crashes will reduce positive emotions of interaction with app. No one will recommend bad working product. Only, advising NOT to use it, and we don’t need that, right?
Be Unique
The more your app is unique — the more people will talk about it. It will be a great bonus for you if people are ready to share info about your product because of its special idea, awesome design or outstanding functionality.
This sort of things could interest bloggers. They could write or shoot a review about your app.
Several days ago I saw quite interesting (to be honest it was quite funny) review on one app. Right after I watched the video I sent it to my brother. When we met in the evening of the same day he was already using this app. And it wasn’t free to download.
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So find bloggers that could promote your products. Some of them will take money, others will do it for free. Pick bloggers who have the same target audience to yours.
Help Users
Give users a little push and they will do everything else by themselves. But to it right.
Some apps ask to rate them through push notifications or every time user runs them. This idea might be not the best one, because people can be annoyed of it or just unsatisfied about your app (yes, it happens) and they will harm good rating.
Use app metrics, find loyal users who will be happy to give you 5 stars rating. This people are also more likely to share your app through social networks. But sharing with friends must be proposed delicately.
Make an offer your users can’t refuse.
Propose some additional benefit for each user that wiuld be referred by existing user. But make sure that people would be happy to reffer. Great example is Dropbox company. Users got additional storage space for each reffered users. For 30 days of refferal programm users sent 2.8 million direct refferal invites. See whole presentation by Drew Houston, co-founder of Dropbox, it was released in 2010 but numbers can be still quite interesting.
Share Stories
You can share stories on your social media about users of your product and how it helps them to live better. Find people that will be happy to tell this kind of story.
On the one hand story heroes would be happy to be highlighted by you or get some additional benefits of using your app. On the other hand, other people would be interested to find out how your products work for real people in their lives.
Let people share information about you. Be social, have profiles in social networks where your potential audience spends time. Sharing a post to a friend is much easier than looking for your website, copying its url and only then going to social network and sending it to a friend.
Let people discover your app in social networks. Post interesting and unique content, discuss things in comments, etc.
Research some of your competitors, use their best practices and check their social networks accounts — they can give a tip on what would work good for you too and what things not to do at all. Good luck!
